Rap and Rap Sheet

John McWhorter despairs at the bad image violent rappers provide for black America in today's OpinionJournal - Taste Page.
I think the article is right and revealing. One paragraph especially caught me. I have loved blues, jazz and Motown soul my whole life. Black Americans have created almost all the great American music. McWhorter says "Blacks under a certain age feel [rap] music as their poetry, rattling off extended selections as readily as Russians recite Pushkin."
"But this is a lowdown, dirty shame. I am just old enough to remember when whites were making the sourest, nastiest pop music while blacks were making the sweetest and truest. White kids listened to hideous screaming while funk and soul were black America's soundtrack. As a kid in the 1970s I was conscious of that contrast and proud of it. The civil-rights protesters a decade before, who made the lives of 'the hip-hop generation' possible, would have been appalled to hear the likes of Jay-Z, and we would be hard-pressed to claim that they would have been somehow missing something in that judgment. They accomplished a lot more, too, than any rapper's sideline donations to community efforts ever will."